Tuesday, June 7, 2016

I’ve
been asked so often what the difference was between a suffragette and a
suffragist that I usually give a brief explanation in my talks to the effect
that before 1906 anyone who campaigned for the vote was called a suffragist.
After 1906 the term “suffragette” came into being: it was coined by a Daily Mail journalist to describe members
of the militant Women’s Social and Political Union founded by Mrs Pankhurst
in 1903.

So a
suffragette was a militant and a suffragist was a non-militant. That the
campaigners themselves perceived the distinction is suggested by circumstances
such as the militant Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) renaming their newspaper
“The Suffragette” (in 1912).
Meanwhile, the non-militant National Union Women of Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) proudly
displayed a banner at its events proclaiming that they were “law-abiding
suffragists”.

In
reality the situation was more complicated than that. The term “suffragist”
continued to be used to mean suffrage campaigners. It was also used interchangeably
with “suffragette”. Newspapers described NUWSS members as “suffragettes”, or
told hair-raising tales of “suffragists” heckling MPs or carrying out attacks
on property. As one example out of many, a report of a speech by Augustine
Birrell in Southampton given in The Times
on 13 November 1907 described the ejected women hecklers as both suffragists
and suffragettes.

This
interchangeability had the effect of blurring the distinction between the
constitutional campaigners of the NUWSS and the law-breaking campaigners of the
WSPU. One consequence of this was that NUWSS women were as likely to be targeted
by anti-suffrage mobs as the suffragettes – as many of them found during the non-militant
Suffrage Pilgrimage organised by the NUWSS in 1913. After Birrell’s visit to
Southampton, The Southampton Times reported that a constitutional campaigners’ meeting was broken up by
students “unable or unwilling” to distinguish between them and militants.

The confusion had the further effect of alienating people from the
suffrage cause. David Lloyd George articulated this view during a speech in
Swindon in October 1913, when he said that the militants had “converted
indifference into something like bitter hostility”. The result was that the
public were prejudiced against all suffrage campaigners. Not surprisingly, this
generated a great deal of resentment from the non-militant NUWSS towards the
militant WSPU. For example, Winifred Coombe Tennant, President of the Neath District
Women’s Suffrage Society, described women who interrupted Labour MP Arthur Henderson
in the Albert Hall on 14 February 1914 as “idiots”. In her less exasperated
moments, she characterised militancy as “pitiful misguided folly…a fine thing gone
wrong”.

Suffragists on the War Path - or should it be Suffragettes?

Winifred
Coombe Tennant decided that something must be done to put the record straight. In
1914 she wrote to the Morning Post
about the use of the words. When the editor wrote back to her she decided to
start a campaign to encourage a more precise usage. She drafted a statement calling
for recognition of the distinction so that “the word ‘suffragettes’ [would] designate
the militant section of the women’s suffrage movement and…the word
‘suffragists’ the law-abiding sections of the movement”. The statement pointed
out that this had been accepted usage for some years, and also referred to the
WSPU’s official adoption of the term suffragette in the title of their paper The Suffragette.

She
obtained the signatures of a number of what she called “eminent men of letters
and other prominent persons”, many of them Cambridge intellectuals with whom
she was connected by a friendship network, as well as her interest in psychic research.
Winifred was a medium in contact with, amongst others, Professor Henry Sidgwick
who had died in 1900. (The signatories are listed below.)

Armed
with these formidable endorsements, Winifred Coombe Tennant despatched the
statement to the Morning Post and
other newspapers with a covering letter pointing out that calling suffragists
suffragettes and vice-versa “create[s] confusion and prejudice in the mind of
the public.” She asked them to adopt the usage recommended by the signed
statement. The Manchester Guardian
published the letter and the statement on 23 April 1914 with the comment, “The
distinction suggested has long been made by the Manchester Guardian”.

Despite
Winifred Coombe Tennant’s efforts, the use of the words suffragist and
suffragette to denote non-militant and militant campaigners remains confused to
this day. In the excellent film, Make
More Noise, for example, a caption announces “suffragettes” – and the
subsequent image is of a group of NUWSS women – suffragists. I’ve read more
than one history of the suffrage movement in which the author is in a muddle about
suffragists and suffragettes (but to protect the guilty I’m not naming
names!). I’ve even seen the term applied to a man by Martin Pugh who writes
about a “(male) suffragette” in Profiles
in Power: Lloyd George (London and New York: Longman, 1988, p. 61).

Perhaps
it’s because “suffragette” is a made-up word that its meaning and usage have
never really been settled. Many contemporaries objected to it on purely
linguistic grounds. One commentator, the author Lady Bell, thought that the
word was “barbarous…for if it means anything, according to the analogy of words
formed in the same way, it should mean ‘a small suffrage’, and not a woman who
wants to obtain it” (quoted in the Western
Daily Press, 4 October 1907). Perhaps it’s just as well
that Lady Bell’s definition didn’t fare any better than Winifred Coombe
Tennant’s. Now that would have been confusing!

Winifred Coombe Tennant (1874–1956) was a
suffragist, spiritualist, patron of the arts in Wales, a Liberal supporter and
friend of David Lloyd George, and was closely connected with the national
eisteddfod. Extracts from her diaries have been published as Between Two Worlds: The Diary of Winifred
Coombe Tennant 1909-1924, ed Peter Lord, (Aberystwyth: Llyfrgell
Genedlaethol Cymru (National Library of Wales), 2011). It’s a
fascinating read. (Available at
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Between-Two-Worlds-Winifred-1909-1924/dp/1862250863)

G
Lowes Dickinson, a Fellow of King’s College, who promoted the formation of a League
of Nations (and is said to have coined the phrase);

Desmond
MacCarthy, a Cambridge-educated drama critic for the New Statesman, an editor, and member of the Bloomsbury circle;

Professor
Gilbert Murray, Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Oxford, a
supporter of the non-militant women’s suffrage campaign and member of the
League of Nations Union;

Canon
Parry, Senior Dean of Trinity College;

Mrs
Eleanor Sidgwick, Gerald Balfour’s sister and widow of psychic researcher Professor
Henry Sidgwick; he had helped found Newnham College and Mrs Sidgwick was its
first vice-principal and second principal;

L
Pearsall Smith, writer, from an American Quaker family though he subsequently
lost his faith, educated at Harvard and later Oxford, studied language and was co-founder
of the Society for Pure English in 1913;

Professor
James Ward, Professor of Mental Philosophy, Cambridge, who was encouraged to
pursue a Cambridge career by Professor Henry Sidgwick; Ward was an influential
psychologist.

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About Me

I live in Bristol and I write historical fiction and non-fiction. In 2006 I completed an MA in English Literature with the Open University, specialising in eighteenth century literature.
My historical novels are set in the eighteenth century. To date they are: To The Fair Land (2012); and the Dan Foster Mystery Series comprising Bloodie Bones (2015), The Fatal Coin (2017) and The Butcher’s Block (2017). Bloodie Bones was a winner of the Historical Novel Society Indie Award 2016 and a semi-finalist for the M M Bennetts Historical Fiction Award 2016.
The Bristol Suffragettes (non-fiction), a history of the suffragette campaign in Bristol and the south west which includes a fold-out map and walk, was published in 2013.